In this study, the effect of employing ZnO/Acalypha Indica leaf extract (ZAE) on the energy absorption of a coated portable solar cooker has been examined using an experimental setup. A prototypical model has been developed to corroborate in associating an investigative outcome per constituents of the experiments. The studied heat transfer process in ZAE is stable for harsh conditions. The design analysis and an estimation of the system performance were done given various parameters including the pressure of the vacuum envelope, bar plate coating digestion, emissivity, and solar rays. The fabricated solar was tested with and without ZAE to investigate the impact of this coating material on the solar cooker's thermal performance. To observe the performance of the new design, two figures of merit (F1 and F2) have been introduced. The factual food cooking assessments were for a family of four people, which operated in ZAE coating (0.8, 1.0, 1.2 μm) of the solar cooker. The values of F1 and F2 for the proposed cooker were obtained as 0.1520 and 0.4235, respectively, which is intact with the BIS values. The results revealed that employing ZAE instead of a thermal NHC-PV solar cooker reduced the time required to boil 2 L of water for about 47 min. The overall thermal energy productivity of the solar cooker with electrical backup was obtained as 42.65%, indicating that the ZAE coating can improve the thermal efficiency by 10.35%.
Keywords: Electrical backup; Evacuated tubes; Photovoltaic panel; Solar cooker; Thermal model.
© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.